The 1840s were the climax of an era ripe with utopian notions in America, some homegrown and some imported. Many of the ideas and rhetoric that we might associate with, say, the communitarian hippies of the 1960s or various of the “New Age” grouplets since then can actually be traced back through a century or more to that time of bubbling thought. An astonishing number of idealistic communities were established, each devoted to living the perfect life according to some visionary’s intuition or ratiocination. (Full disclosure: I am named, at two removes, for one such visionary, the Welsh reformer Robert Owen, who founded the New Harmony community in Indiana in 1825.)

One of the most celebrated of these visionaries, at least in his own mind, was Bronson Alcott, now best known as the father of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women and other books. I happened to be reading just lately Bernard DeVoto’s The Year of Decision: 1846 and found some delightfully satiric comments on Alcott pére and the wider movement of which he was so representative.

DeVoto quotes Ralph Waldo Emerson, a friend and neighbor of the Alcotts, thus:

Mr. Alcott and Mr. Wright cannot chat or so much as open the mouth on aught less than a new solar system and the prospective education in the nebulae.

DeVoto then looks at Brook Farm, near Boston. It was another community looking to the stars, and it also enlisted the stars, many of the celebrated writers and thinkers of the day, the brightest of whom (notably Nathaniel Hawthorne) soon quit in disgust.

…Brook Farmers, in smocks,…spent the January evenings chatting and munching apples before log fires, reading Consuelo for beautiful sentiments and, as preparation for the more stately mansion they were building, Fourier’s Theory of the Human Passions.

The smock wearers also were making an experiment in economy, and they were very happy. The newest Newness made amazing progress, they loved one another and humanity, the children did so marvelously well in progressive school. Everything was so clear, so easily hand-tinted with pretty words….Under Association, which was Fourier’s principle of economy, right development would go farther still. It would soften and regulate the temperature (a desirable achievement in January at West Roxbury) and increase the warmth at the poles, correct the heat of the equator, bring on eternal springtime, fertilize the desert, and prevent the drying up of streams. Moreover, it would domesticate the beaver and the zebra to man’s uses and increase the fish in lakes and rivers some twentyfold….Association would also put an end to larceny, there would be no theft, no sharp business practices; nine tenths or more of the diseases that afflict man under incoherence or Civilization would disappear, and men would live three times as long.

What’s not to like? Except, I suppose, that global warming at the poles, which, as we now know but Fourier and his followers didn’t, would seriously discommode the polar bear.

There were many similar companies of the sensitive, and they had reached perihelion at Fruitlands, where the Great Inane voiced thoughts while Mrs. Alcott and the children gathered in the barley, a poor wretch was excommunicated for eating a shred of vile flesh, and in the end Alcott turned his face to the wall and hoped to die because virtue had failed.

The lesson must be, I think, that some people and some ideas are simply too fine for Earth.